120 quotes found
“A writer sets up his own amazing experiment: his work of fiction.”
“As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as...”
“In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.”
“Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blan...”
“Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them onto the page, then call them characters.”
“If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.”
“Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.”
“Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.”
“[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying tha...”
“Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, c...”
“A mistake is the name we give to any action in which we perceive a difference between what we intended and what has occurred. Intention fuels every dramatic action, including the writing of dramati...”
“Like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the ho...”
“The characters act for reasons that they cant control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, ...”
“Real people are made out of a whole lot of thingsflesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.”
“Out there, there is some kinda genius person... I am talking about Sherlock Holmes... First very fast talking + in the same full of knowledge.”
“I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist...”
“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' neve...”
“Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss books”
“Its weird how much things can change in only a few minutes. With those three words, I dont remember, our entire futures were changed. Not just for me and Brooklyn, but for the little girl, and Denv...”
“I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.”
